Meteo Xavier

Don't mean to derail the thread, but I am curious now - does anyone have any experience with the Garritan World Instruments set? It sounded a bit weak to me last I remember listening to the demos, but I just now remembered it and wondered if anyone ever tried it.

I found this sentence pretty puzzling considering how much you borked your setup as described above. Why did you upgrade to 8 in the first place? Certainly you did some poking around to check on the operating system and found it to have a wildly mixed response and plenty of similar tales to programs and utilities breaking down like that (it's the same reason I'm not dying to upgrade to 8 yet - why mess with a working system?)

How cheap is cheap and what are you hoping to focus on for "decent"?

I'm having trouble connecting these two, why wouldn't we be worried about a C&D because you guys are more motivated to finish it up? I just feel like I'm missing something there.

It'd likely be entirely in Japanese, you might not be able to read that. Still, it's hard to argue with that example.

You want original music or remixes of Nintendo music?

Why would it need to be exciting? It just needs to be understandable and correct.

I sometimes cut and paste, but I tend to paste out long patterns of the same groove and listen to it until I hear where there should be a change. You can even get creative about which sections you cut and paste out to make the same patterns seem more variated. If I can recommend - go to vgmusic.com and check out a bunch of tracks by Motoi Sakuraba (Star Ocean, Golden Sun, Valkyrie Profile). In my opinion, he's the VGM king of writing variated drum tracks and if you load them into your DAW, you can get a bunch of great ideas and techniques of how to variate them and transition them ok.

Well, there's only one way to find out, isn't there? That's why books like these exist in the first place.

I almost sense a confidence or security issue in there - the problems you mention are roughly the same sharing either WIPs or full tracks. Either one is suspect to be stolen and either one might not be a great representation of your "work" anyway, in fact a WIP is safer all the same since... well, what is someone going to do with a WIP? They can't really improve on it unless they remix it as an original sample, which probably isn't worth the effort. The advantages to putting out WIPs have been mentioned already, so I don't need to repeat that, I just wonder what the fear would be on a practical level. People put out WIPs all the time with music, video games, movie trailers, sketches, etc, and it's pretty rare someone would go "OMG WHAT THE HELL IS THAT SHIT THIS XentertainmentpieceX IS GOING TO SUCK HARD JUST STOP RIGHT NOW". I'd say you really have nothing at all to worry about.

Sorry to double post, but I didn't see yours immediately. I actually did look at that one earlier and I do think its probably the closest of what I'm looking for. I am sort of worried at the age of the books considering how much further MIDI samples have come, but, again, since thats the way they learned to do it in the first place, I can't dismiss it. Good to see someone else recommends it so far.

Well, I've already done 10 years worth of critical listening and practice and I've only gotten so far with that. Yeah, a book is a substitute, because the other method doesn't work that well for everyone. That "use your ears" advice is ridiculously overused in my opinion. You may as well tell someone wanting to build a deck, "just go look at other decks and you'll figure out how to build one." Maybe everyone else is secretly an audio savant who just doesn't think to do the obvious, but I myself can't learn advanced techniques with beginner advice and philosophy alone. If there aren't any good books on the subject, that's fine, I'll have to do it the hard way after all, but with college classes and a whole industry that thrives on it, I can't imagine no one actually committed anything to paper. Again, I don't mean to come off frustrated, that just doesn't make any sense to me.

Because that's really not what I'm asking. Why would I want to create my own? I already have like 5,000 different samples and synth instruments. I already have the sounds themselves, from rock to electronica and so on, and I'm asking if there are recommended textbooks or other published guides on teaching you how to produce professional quality tracks with MIDI samples and synths. For example, I would like to know how professionals used to make a sampled electric guitar, B3 organ and acoustic drum set sound like a convincing enough prog track, as with the Motoi Sakuraba examples I listed in the first track. I don't know much about "tweaking" samples in the first place and I'm asking what can teach me actually HOW to do that correctly and mix it together right. I hope I'm not coming off frustrated, but I really don't know why this question is difficult. I'm just asking for textbooks that teach me how to make MIDI samples realistic - that's all.

I'm not looking for anything specifically on orchestration, I have a book for that. I'm just looking for material that teaches me how to better use MIDI samples for general use - like the VGM composers and producers had to learn to make do with when they were doing SNES, PS1 and N64 soundtracks, the examples I posted, and the knowledge and training OCR artists use for their Ocremixes today. I'm just looking for any good textbooks or other books I can use to improve my sample-based work all the way around. I know that stuff exists and I know people here have used them - I'm just wanting to know what those recommendations might be.

Umm, why exactly do you need hentai translated? Is it not already pretty obvious what's going on onscreen?

I understand that, thats why I'm asking here. That books looks like it largely just covers composition, which, without trying to toot my own horn, is not really what I'm lacking. I'm lacking the production skill and I'd like to find one decent, organized authority on it like MIDI GUIDE TO ORCHESTRATION is for general application and use, if such a thing exists. Does that book cover production with MIDI samples?

One of my New Year's resolutions this year is to stop working on projects and actually sit down and improve my production ability all the way around. I'm going to restructure everything and then sit down and learn how its done right. For this, I have the MIDI GUIDE TO ORCHESTRATION and the DANCE MUSIC MANUAL that intend to teach me the ins and outs of properly producing orchestral and electronica music. What I'm asking here is, are there such books for very general applications to ALL genres? I want to be able to do reasonably well-sounding Rock/Jazz/Fusion/World, etc, based on whatever project I'm working on and I know there have to be some education that can apply all the way around, without needing to focus on one genre or the other (as proven by the many talented musicians here). I hope to someday be able to produce something like this: . Although I would settle for something simpler like: or .Yes, basically I want to be Motoi Sakuraba. Are there such quality books in the vein of MIDI GUIDE TO ORCHESTRATION for something like this? If so, what do you recommend and/or what did you use to learn how you did it if you had to study it like this? Thank you!

2011 Resolution: Get married to an awesome Japanese chick in the most unlikely romance arrangement an inexperienced aspie gumpball like me could have possibly undertaken. ACCOMPLISHED 2012 Resolution: Become a home and American land owner in my hometown and get listed as an actual VGM composer with IMPULSE. ACCOMPLISHED 2013 Resolution: No more projects. Rebuild, rebuild, rebuild. TBA

Holy fucking shit. After yet another ridiculous day of trying to get this fucking software installed, somehow, and at this point in my haze of frustration, I fucking got it to work again. I don't know how I did it, but I did. The sample library still isn't back on here, but that's beside the point. It runs in FL Studio now like it was supposed to. When I get my thoughts cleared up and the library installed, I will update the solution in the first post. Thank you very much everyone who took the time to help me out here. I very much needed you and I literally could not have done it without your support. Yes, this means a lot to me, because bricking software I spent $1,200 is a big fucking problem on my end.

Update on Karth's track - I was able to replace it with a reasonably decent piano set through Berlin Grand on Kontakt and it works 99% with the exception of 1 second of music where there is some pop-and-hiss style distortion on top of the piano because its changing tempo and the samples do not like that for some reason. Is there a way to fix this in Kontakt 5? It's just barely noticeable enough and doesn't really kill the track at all, IMO, but it is a noticeable wart on an otherwise clean and decent track. Do you think I could get away with it? Edit: Nevermind, fixed it. It wasn't Kontakt, it was Fruity Delay.

Its already completely gone, but just in case, I'd be happy to take up on that offer should it install without them. I appreciate that.

My EW Pianos Gold is currently not working on my system, so I'm working on re-doing Karth's piano track some with Kontakt's piano. I'm not in love with the sample set and I may try something else, but at least a better version of that will come soon. I'm still trying to decide if I should redo the last track because I genuinely don't really like the quality of it (it's several years old), but as my Eastwest stuff is not operational, I don't really know how to fix it just yet and I'm just fuckin' worn out of doing music. I may ask for a collaborator there. Just some updates from my end.

I haven't had time to do it yet. I need to schedule a day with full concentration on my end to try it out. I think part of the problem is just PLAY's bizarre program system - it installs itself in like 4 different folders at least. I probably should not need to run CCleaner again after this, since it was to clean up 3 years of use already, but if this works again, I'll definitely be mindful of it in the future. I'll keep people posted on this - again not intending to be that self-important, but as an example for the next person who runs CCleaner with EWCC and wants to know what the hell to do.

How cheap is cheap? Reaper sounds like the best bet there, but without an actual number behind it, it's hard to tell how many opportunities you really have there.